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Information Architecture
Thinking through and documenting the answers to the overarching user question, "How do I work this?" is what happens in the IA part of a web project.
When you don't have that process, you can wind up with a muddled site that pushes and pulls people in opposite directions. When you do have the process, you reach agreement on priorities, trade-offs and calls to action.
Site Audits / Wireframes / Feature Sets -- The Big Deliverables
Request Marketing has been doing this for a while, and we don't just walk in, point out obvious flaws, and leave. We work with you to develop narratives and drawings that spell out what you have going on now, and where you could be focusing the attention of your site visitors instead.
The deliverables include consultations and documentations against these main processes:
Site Audits: We'll go through your existing site and document the steps that users take to do what you want them to do. The straighter the path from Point A to Point B, the better. We'll see what's going, we'll highlight places where you're actually making people take detours through Points E and P on the way from A to B, and we'll make recommendations for smoothing the paths.
Wireframes and User Flows: Schematic drawings of an existing site, or of a new site in the planning stage, are a focusing tool for thinking through what happens next when someone clicks. A user clicked here, so now they go where?
Feature Sets: Adding the sun roof, the CD player and the leather seats doesn't make a car go faster. Same thing with web sites -- more features won't necessarily get users to their goals more effectively. We'll work with you to see which features are working for you, which are in the way, and how to make it all work better.
Specifications Documents: Whether you think of spec docs as the institutional memory, as the archiving of all those white board sessions and arm-waving discussions, or as a necessary evil, they are key to tracking progress against goals. And woe unto the site that doesn't have them when it's time for major revisions. We'll reverse engineer your specifications docs from your existing site if you didn't do it the last time around, or create them from scratch if your site is still in the planning stage. And we'll show you how to do them for yourself later, if you want to.
- Existing sites
If your site is already up, we can reverse engineer IA documentation if you don't have any, from developing feature sets that clearly spell out what you want to happen on your site, to creating user flows that map the paths that you are currently driving users down.
Then there's the next step -- recommendations and solutions for fixing things that don't work, and for making things start working better.
- New sites
Get your IA work done right at the beginning, and everything going forward will be so much more clear. Sites always change and grow when real people use them and smart companies learn from their actions -- and your improvements later will start from a high vantage point now.
